March 24, 2010

The call for papers has been issued for the “8th Annual International Open and User Innovation Workshop,” aka OUI 2010.

I had a great time at OUI 2009 and UOI 2008, due to the stimulating combination of early stage research and first-rate innovation minds. I now do everything I can (within university travel budgets) to attend each year. In 2008 I attended UOI (née User Innovation Workshop) to learn more about User Innovation, and felt like a fish out of water as one of the few OI researchers. However, in Hamburg last year there was a significant contingent of OI researchers, including a few from host TUHH.

OUI 2010 will be hosted by MIT and held in Cambridge from August 2-4, 2010. Host Eric von Hippel asks that participants limit their submissions to topics directly related to the CFP, as the conference has been growing exponentially over recent years and (due to logistical reasons) is limited to 150 participants.

The timing is intended so that international visitors can leave OUI and head north to Montreal, where the Academy of Management begins August 8. Other people will be heading to Montréal in time for the August 6 start of PDW sessions. I will be among them, so I can speak at Frank Piller and Holger Schiele’s PDW session Saturday afternoon called “Open Innovation with Suppliers.”

Note: 2008 was the User and Open Innovation Workshop, but 2009 and now 2010 workshops are actually Open and User Innovation (as in 2010). I have corrected the 2009 posts to reflect this.

March 12, 2010

Today I gave a progress report on my O/U/CI research with Marcel Bogers to my colleagues at the SJSU College of Business. The nominal reason was to prove that I deserved a summer support grant last summer (which we call the Lucas Fellowship after our donor), but it was also a way to try out some ideas for a paper that is in draft form but not at a journal.

At some point — perhaps after the paper is posted to SSRN or under review at a journal — I’ll share some of the ideas from the paper, but right now I’m more like a superstitious doctoral student (rather than a tenured full professor) in not wanting to circulate it prematurely.

However, a couple of slides won’t be ending up in the paper so I thought I’d share them. One is slide was an update of the citation counts of O/U/CI research from last November:

Another slide went back to my observation (which we should have mentioned in West & Gallagher 2006) that inbound open innovation — particularly from individuals — looks a lot like lead users/firms utilizing user innovation. It extends my earlier interest in how to study crowd sourcing, as well as my interest in both monetary and non-monetary incentives for individuals to supply external innovations.

So this was my O/U/CI slide comparing two ways how to think about crowd sourcing:

UI model

Users have sticky knowledge

Apply knowledge to solve own problems

Make it easy to obtain free revealing

OI model:

Users/non-users have knowledge

Maximize return from that knowledge

Use markets to identify, source ideas

My point is that OI covers almost any type of external innovation, but usually emphasizes monetary incentives — West & Gallagher 2006 being a notable exception. Meanwhile, user innovation is supposed to be about “users,” but a lot of crowd sourcing (or “wisdom of crowds”) utilizes individual knowledge not directly related to personal use.

I won’t claim the slide is profound, but under deadline to make my presentation, felt I got a clearer perspective than any previous attempt to explain why I thought both models were applicable here.

Of course, it’s easy to make a PPT deck and hard to do a quality empirical study. Lars Bo Jeppesen and Karim Lakhani have a forthcoming empirical paper in Organization Science, “Marginality and Problem-Solving Effectiveness in Broadcast Search.” The paper is more about problem-solving and search than about OI and UI, but it mentions both Chesbrough and von Hippel in passing.